Amazon Web Services provides an AWS Free Tier (http://aws.amazon.com/free/) option for evaluation purposes. The AWS Free Tier provides access to many products and services, including Amazon EC2, at no cost, within certain limitations. After completing the steps to Create a Free Account, you can quickly create a "Free Tier Eligible" instance of Linux with a public IP address that you can use to increase your knowledge of Linux concepts.

In the AWS Management Console, open the Amazon EC2 Dashboard by clicking the EC2 icon in the upper-left of the console.

In the region selector in the navigation bar, select the region that is geographically closest to you. All resources required to run your instance must be created in the same region.

Follow the steps in Create a Key Pair. If you plan to connect to your Linux instance from Windows, be sure to follow the instructions in the section titled (Optional) To prepare to connect to a Linux instance from Windows using PuTTy. Save the resulting .ppk file to the same folder as the .pem file that you downloaded.

In the console navigation pane, click EC2 Dashboard. In the Create Instance section of the console, click Launch Instance.

On the Step 1 page, find the first Ubuntu Server in the list of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) and click the corresponding Select button.

At the bottom-right of the page, click Next: Tag Instance and apply the following options in Step 5: Tag Instance: • Enter a Name for Key and corresponding text for Value; for example, set Key = Name and Value = Ubuntu test.

At the bottom-right of the page, click Next: Configure Security Group and apply the following options in Step 6: Configure Security Group: • Assign a security group – Enable the option Create a new security group. • Security group name – Enter a descriptive value for the security group; for example, TrustySG. • Description – Either leave the default value or enter a description, such as Security Group for Ubuntu Trusty.

At the bottom-right of the page, click Review and Launch. At the bottom-right of Step 7: Review Instance Launch, click Launch.

From the Select an existing key pair or create a new key pair dialog box, select the key pair you created in step 4 from the Select a key pair dropdown, check the acknowledgement box, and click Launch Instances.

On the Launch Status page, in the section Your instance is now launching, click the instance ID (i-xxxxxxxx).

As soon as Status Checks complete successfully and Instance State status is running, connect to your instance using one of the methods described in Connect to Your Linux Instance.

To avoid unnecessary charges, stop your instance when you are not using it. If you qualify for Free Tier, make sure you understand the pricing guidelines. When you are completely finished using your instance, complete the steps described in Clean Up Your Instance and Volume to help ensure that you do not incur unnecessary charges.